I would like to make a map displaying how several building uses have changed during the last decades. For example, this building was built in the year 1483 as a monastery, in 1880 it turned into a seminary and since then it has been a prison (1936-1939), has been abandoned (1939-1940), then transformed into a boarding school (1940-1998) and currently is a camping house (1998-present time).
I was thinking of adding two new date fields start_date and end_date in the layer with the geometry and other attributes and then combine everything with TimeManager plugin so I could dynamically see the evolution. Unfortunately that's not enough, as 1) the uses may change whereas the geometry will be the same one; and 2) that would only allow me to have a single use per row instead of having a complete uses' history. That made me think that I need to have more than one row for the same building if I want to have a "history" of uses. For that reason I was then thinking of creating a layer for the geometry and a different one for the building uses with the following fields:
- id
- geometry_id
- description
- start_date
- end_date
By doing this I could easily "relate" a single geometry with one or more uses (each of them being a different row, each one having its own start and end dates). Unfortunately I do not know how can I relate both layers in an easy and fast way (preferably using GUI - I don't think that doing a regular join would be enough, as I have no easy way to know the geometry_id values beforehand) nor I am sure that is the best approach to do so (looks somewhat complicated to manage if I have many buildings' that I want to keep track of their changes, as it is the case).
What would you recommend me to do?
